Monday, May 23, 2016

This is the second of two entries against American exceptionalism. The first dealt with the period of the revolutionary war of independence. This one addresses the occupation of the South after the Civil War and the failure to create a democratic capitalist system there.

Americans, including academics, have an immense appetite for books, stories and
films about the
people, processes, and details of the Revolution and the Civil War.
American academics have a nearly equally immense appetite for books and articles about democratization, but more
recently their tastes have changed to include studies of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and
repression. Neither citizens at large nor academics, however, have much of a taste for the period in which
American history comprises grim accounts of authoritarianism, terror, dictatorship and the violent
overthrow of elected governments—the period between 1876 and 1956.

American academics do occasionally research and write about those years but
they prefer to focus on what are, generally, more uplifting stories. These include the
expansion of American industry, the political integration of millions of Southern and Eastern
European immigrants, the development of the welfare state, and the increasingly important role of the US
as a global power. What negative aspects there are to the role of urban political machines, the
unequal distribution of wealth in the Gilded Age, and the inability (or unwillingness) of the US to
bring democracy to the real or metaphorical islands where US troops were dispatched from the Philippines to
Central America or the Caribbean form a necessary counterpoint to the ineluctably progressive
character of the American experience.

Inherent in these stories—whether told in the academic or the popular press—is
the belief that America is one country with one people. Its territorial boundaries expand
and its population becomes increasingly diverse but, as our national motto has it, we are, out of many,
one. Walt Whitman is our national poet because he celebrates our protean ability to combine multitude of
individuals. To the extent that we may be slightly skeptical of how
exceptional we are, we sometimes note the role that ideas of race have played
in the history of the American state and American society. Because African
slavery in Americas was nearly coextensive with white settlement, we have come
to see African Americans as people against whom there has been discrimination
but who are historically part and parcel of the American people and American
history.

There are sound reasons for looking at American history this way, but we can
learn something else about the history of our country and the world by looking
at things slightly differently: as the centuries-long account of attempting, with varying degrees of success, the
integration of two very different countries—one with liberal democratic and market institutions riven
by class conflict and one with an authoritarian political system and a command economy and a caste
society—into one and of attempting, often with very little success, to democratize one of them. Seen in this light and shorn of the idea that the conflict over race is simply
a matter of individual prejudice (although that too exists) similarities between
post-colonial states in the Middle East, Asia and Africa with the United States become more apparent.

For anyone interested in whether an occupying army can accomplish democratization or the ways in which a
dispossessed elite regains authority or simply how much political capital US governments are willing to
expend in the pursuit of democratization, the years between 1865 and 1960 in the American South provide
a wealth of insight. In April 1865 the Federal government won the war it had prosecuted for four
years against an insurgent government, the Confederate States of America. Unlike many
rebellious movements the CSA was a fully formed state. It had an army,
governing institutions and offices, diplomatic representatives, and a legal system. It claimed and, except when
militarily defeated by the Union army, largely succeeded in maintaining a monopoly of legitimate violence in the
territory it claimed. Had the Union not occupied the south, including its successive capitals, there
is no reason to believe that it would have been anything other than a functioning state in the global
system of states.

It is generally understood today that the war was fought over the issue of
slavery but what this means is often unclear. The war was not fought over racial discrimination, but
over whether the state would recognize and defend property rights in human beings. More exactly it was
fought to determine whether a political system in which slavery provided an
elite with crucial economic power would continue to exist in North America where it had already been abolished in the two neighboring polities of Canada
and Mexico. The Emancipation Proclamation was a tool through which the Union
destroyed the economy of the CSA. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to
the US constitution in 1865 outlawing slavery made the re-creation of the Old
South’s political economy impossible.

Over the next twenty years several Republican presidents and congressional
majorities wrestled with the problem we now call democratization.
They thought of it as a problem of how to construct republican
government. In a world of monarchies and empires, political theorists
still thought more about republics than democracies as the alternative
to autocratic rule. Equally pressing was that the wording of the US
constitution permitted the Congress to ensure that the various states had
republican not democratic governments.

The fourteenth Amendment to the constitution and the civil rights act of 1866
were initial attempts to create political (but not social) equality between black and white
citizens. In the mid-19th century several states of the Deep South had
black majorities and thus political equality necessarily transferred power in
any fair and free election. Former slaves were solidly Republican voters
but the candidates they supported were usually white.Some were from the South and others were
immigrants from the North.It is
testimony to the continued power of the political vocabulary of southern
reaction that the nomenclature to describe these whites, “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”,
has survived into the 21st century.

To a degree perhaps unprecedented in human history, the
racism that structures relationships between black and white Americans is the
outcome of conscious human decision-making.Unlike the relationships between Shi’i and Sunni Muslims or Armenians
and Turks or Koreans and Japanese, there simply are no historical categories
that correspond to white and black as Americans understand them before
1620.Neither the progenitors of
Europeans or Africans inhabited the continents that were to be named after the
obscure Italian navigator Vespucci.If
the children of Europe came largely of their own volition, the children of
Africa were brought in chains and suffering and the relationship between the
two developed in relatively well-documented historical time.

With the exception of the American Indian peoples, neither
the US constitution, ordinary politics, nor American scholarship is in the
least at ease with the idea that ours is a multi-ethnic or pluri-national country.There was really no time when Black and white
in America lived happily together in a paradise riven by colonial
machinations.And yet precisely because
this is so it is easier to re-imagine the historical processes of American
economic and political history creating two distinct nations and facing,
however imperfectly, the necessity of transforming them into one.

It is common today to look with some disdain on movements
and thinkers in American history who seriously considered that black and white
Americans were separate peoples.Merely
to state it in those terms seems to provide the segregationists and
slave-owners with a kind of victory.Such a refusal ignores that Abraham Lincoln looked favorably on the idea
that freed slaves would be best returned to Africa. Many whites and a number of
black in the nineteenth century supported colonization of West Africa and the
creation of the state of Liberia.It is
easy to condescend to Marcus Garvey and his Back to Africa movement.With his hats and his bluster and the
ultimate collapse of his movement in corruption he is no longer an inspiring
figure, but there was a moment when hundreds of thousands of African Americans
considered him a beacon of hope in a violent and impoverished time.Garvey, like many earlier figures who
promoting the return of African Americans to Africa, seems to have thought of
them as a people that only required a territory of their own to become truly a
nation.

The one theoretical claim that African Americans might be a
distinct nation within the US is even more suspect.Harry Haywood, a long-forgotten Black
Communist, wrote Negro Liberation precisely to propose that the
inhabitants of the Black Belt deserved recognition as a separate nation with a
separate territory.Uncomfortable as we
may be today with the concept of reparations, it is far easier to consider
reparations than the idea of a sovereign or semi-sovereign entity on the
territory of the United States with an African-American elite.Writing within the framework of Stalin’s
definition of nationhood, Haywood proposed to his comrades that the Negro
people were a nation because they shared language, history, economic relations,
and culture. Haywood realized that the Negro people shared many of these
characteristics with whites. There is nothing anomalous in Haywood’s argument
if we recognize the Irish, Welsh or Scots as nationalities distinct from the
English despite sharing with their former overlords these same presumably
primal characteristics.What
distinguishes those nations from each other would be either their claim to
antiquity—an existence prior to conquest—or a “national project” in modern
times.Haywood understood that an
African-American people were created by conquest and slavery and thus could not
pre-date it, but his work remains of interest if we can see in Garvey, Malcolm
X, and other leaders the enunciation of a national project. American academics
no longer believe that nations are created by shared structural characteristics
and thus Haywood’s argument has long been forgotten.

Seen in these lights, the post-Reconstruction period of
American history looks more like the forerunner of later American attempts (and
conspicuous failures) to impose democracy on divided societies and less like
the halting progress of triumphant liberalism.The Confederacy looks more like an alien society whose autonomous
existence whether within the United States or as an independent entity posed an
existential threat to the liberal, industrial, market-oriented Federal republic.

The defeat and occupation of the CSA posed dilemmas for
victors and vanquished alike.The
Radical Republicans were all too aware that they might have won the war only to
lose the peace while the former political
and economic elite of the conquered territory sought desperately to prevent the
transformation of their loss of status and influence into complete irrelevance
and replacement by a new mixed elite of blacks and whites.

Writing in 1935, WEB DuBois in Black Reconstruction
described a “singular schism in the South.The white planter endeavored to keep the Negro at work for his own
profit on terms that amounted to slavery and which were hardly distinguishable
from it…Meanwhile the poor white did not want the Negro put to profitable
work.He wanted the Negro beneath the
feet of the white worker.”DuBois
further described the unease of the victors: “Back of all the enthusiasm and
fervor of victory in the North came a wave of reflection that represented the
sober after-thought of the nation.It
harked back to a time when not one person in ten believed in Negroes, or in
emancipation, or in any attempt to conquer the South.This feeling began to arise before the war
closed, and after it ended it rose higher and higher into something like
dismay.”

DuBois viewed the task of Reconstruction as the
revolutionary remaking of the Southern economy.His analysis was as cool as his prose was ardent.He summed up the penultimate chapter of Black
Reconstruction with the words “How the civil war in the South began
again—indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of
Ages by hate, hurt, and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet
lives and fights.”As DuBois recognized,
“it is always difficult to stop war, and doubly difficult to stop a civil
war.Inevitably, when men have long been
trained to violence and murder, the habit projects itself into civil life after
peace, and there is crime and disorder and social upheaval, as we who live in
the backwash of World War [I] know too well…When to all this you add a servile
and disadvantaged race, who represent the cause of war and who afterwards are
left near naked to their enemies, war may go on more secretly, more
spasmodically, and yet as truly as before the peace.This was the case in the South after Lee’s
surrender.”

DuBois recognized military dictatorship (his description) as
the necessary instrument to transform the South and that the failure of the
revolutionary project of Reconstruction (again, his description) to create a
liberal, market-oriented South brought in its wake an even more potent
counter-revolution.Americans, DuBois
noted, “apparently expected that this social upheaval was going to be
accomplished with peace, honesty, and efficiency, and that the planters were
going to quietly surrender the right to live on the labor of black folk, after
two hundred and fifty years of habitual exploitation.”

DuBois’s Marxist-inflected analysis is predicated on the
belief that force and violence necessarily accompany profound social and
political transformations.His account
therefore highlighted the use of violence to forestall the revolutionary
implications of Reconstruction.Political science today is less concerned with violence than was DuBois
and this is especially true, as DuBois suggested, of the study of American
politics.DuBois himself, as do many
analysts, described the Ku Klux Klan as a major contributor to the violence
that overthrew Reconstruction and that sealed the victory of
counter-revolution.The Klan, however,
was a national organization and had largely been dismantled by 1872 thanks to
vigorous Federal prosecution.The decade
before DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction a new incarnation of the Klan
emerged and the organization was therefore once again on the minds of American
progressives.Nevertheless too great a
focus on the Ku Klux Klan places too little emphasis on the degree to which
local elites deployed violence not simply against individuals but against even
the institutions of the state.Repeated
and sometimes successful attempts by terrorists and unofficial militias to
overthrow local governments by force were a pervasive feature of life in the
South between 1866 and 1900.

The power of DuBois’s analysis is clarified by a closer look
at the violence that pervaded the South from 1866 until 1900.The Ku Klux Klan was one, but only one,
organizational expression of widespread white resistance to equality for
African Americans in the former CSA.Radical Republicans and the multi-volume House and Senate investigative
reports on the activities of the Klan published in 1872 recognized that
opposition to democracy in the South transcended the Klan. The majority report
noted that Southern whites would accept no reconstruction “so long as it embraced
the liberation, the civil and political elevation, of the negro [sic].”

Disrupting the Klan entailed mass arrests and in one case
(South Carolina) the suspension of the right of habeas corpus.If the Klan itself had been broken by
aggressive Federal military intervention the decentralized and partly
spontaneous activity of terrorist groups and local white militias grew.The use of violence to attack constituted and
frequently democratically elected governments throughout the South continued
until at least the end of the nineteenth century.This was well beyond 1876, conventionally
understood as the end of Reconstruction. Even halting and temporary
democratization required the use of the full power of the occupation to
forestall counter-democratic coercion.

Violence occurred early in New Orleans.In 1866 a planter-dominated elected
legislature voted to restore the pre-Civil War constitution.The governor, a planter named James Madison
Wells, vetoed the legislation and called a Constitutional Convention to meet in
New Orleans, then the seat of government of Louisiana.Mayor John Monroe, a leader of a secret
society, armed the police and local citizens to attack the convention when it
opened.What amounted to a pogrom
occurred on May 30, 1866 in which between 38 and 48 people were killed and more
than a hundred wounded.General Philip
Sheridan, who President Grant had appointed as the governor of the Southwest
Military District, returned from Texas and called it a massacre.Had it not been for the presence of Federal
troops and their willingness to intervene Reconstruction in New Orleans would
have been ended before it began.The
Convention that Sheridan enabled finally sat in 1868 and adopted a constitution
that guaranteed political rights to the black population and that repealed a
repressive labor code although it limited suffrage to men.

Sheridan, for whom a square in Washington DC is named, is
not a particularly appealing figure to many modern eyes.He led the Army of Shenandoah which
duplicated Sherman’s more famous March to the Sea in its devastation of the
Confederate civil economy.He fought
similar campaigns against the Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa as well as the Ute
War, the Red River War, and the Great Sioux War.He responded with vigor in New Orleans.He summarily dismissed Governor Wells, Mayor
Monroe, and stripped much of the white population of their voting rights.He was himself dismissed by President Andrew
Johnson who accused him of being a tyrant.

To accomplish the democratic reconstruction of Louisiana and
the rest of the South would require more than one constitutional
convention.In Grant County armed
militias faced each other during a particularly tumultuous and tense conflict
over local elections.In April 1873, in
the wake of a highly contentious electoral process in which a Republican and
Democrat both claimed victory, black and white militias fought a battle for
control of the county courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana.Armed whites, led by former Confederate
officers, overpowered a black militia led by former Union officers.In addition to horses and guns the white
militia also had a four pound cannon.By
the end of the fighting, between 100 and 275 black men, women, and children
were dead; many had been executed with shots to the back of the head.The Colfax massacre (as it was then known)
became a national scandal but its repercussions were primarily to confirm the
efficacy of violence by white militias. In 1950 the state of Louisiana placed a
roadside sign at the site of the Colfax massacre justifying it.

It is thus not surprising that the following year in New
Orleans white militias again attempted to use violence to decide the issue of
political power.This was the Battle of
Liberty Place when, in 1874, the White League acting as the “Louisiana State
Militia” attacked a meeting of a disputed legislature.Some 5000 members of the League defeated 3500
police and state militiamen and took control of the legislative building for three
days until they were driven out by Federal troops.In 1891, in the wake of the formal
disenfranchisement of the state’s black population, the New Orleans city
council erected a monument to commemorate the 1874 events.The monument was placed in a prominent
location on Canal Street and, although it was moved in 1993, it remained on
public view until 2015.

The withdrawal of Federal troops after the compromise of the
1876 presidential election sealed the end of Reconstruction.The conflict over the political rights of
black people continued.In North
Carolina political violence culminated in 1898 in what has been described as
the only successful coup d’etat in American history: the legally elected
government of a major American city was overthrown by an armed insurrection.
Until 1898 Wilmington had been a black majority city but in the wake of
disputed election a secret society of white supremacists organized a group of
armed men, including the “Wilmington Light Infantry” to attack black-owned
businesses including the newspaper.These men, properly described as a mob, then forced the white Republican
mayor and other members of the city council to resign and installed a new
one.By 1898, unlike 1868 and 1873-4,
there were no Federal troops to reverse the use of violence to overthrow an
elected government.Black residents fled
and Wilmington became a white-majority city.In modern terms we might describe this as a form of ethnic cleansing as
well as a coup. What we call the “Great Migration” of African-Americans out of
the South in the twentieth century was a slower process by which refugees
sought safety and new beginnings and in which the demographic character of the
South was changed.In 1868 nearly 60% of
the residents of Mississippi were black; today a little less than 40% are.

The insurgents who successfully installed a white
supremacist government were widely recognized and known by their clothing: red
shirts.In the late 19th
century red shirts had a different meaning than today.Garibaldi’s troops wore them in Italy and
they were widely associated with the militias of nationalist movements.Throughout Europe and Latin America the
wearing of red shirts was understood to reveal the patriotic sentiments and
willingness to use force associated with rising nationalism.

There is every reason to believe that we should see
Reconstruction more nearly in the light of contemporary nationalisms,
state-building, and the suppression of the political rights of minorities than
simply as a failed or premature struggle to extend the virtues of American
liberal individualism against prejudice.A declining old white Southern elite and a rising new one struggled to
subjugate a minority to their control and, in the process, sought to ensure
their control over their fellow members of the majority.They were willing to employ significant
violence in the form of terrorism and insurrection as well as all the legal
methods at their disposal.They saw
themselves as re-creating the nation whose loss they feared military defeat
would bring about.Citizens of the US,
having defeated their enemy, lacked the staying power to transform the society
they had conquered as DuBois argued. After a decade they gave up.And so the honorable citizens of the South,
the religious fundamentalists, the former soldiers of the vanquished regime,
and even those who had been educated in the values of US liberalism in its
finest schools such as Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, collaborated in the
creation of a repressive and authoritarian regime that lasted more than 100
years.